Rate this Card

Rate this item:

Rating: 4.0/5. From 175 votes.

Please wait...

Emberscale Drake Card Review

Remember Shieldmaiden? This is Shieldmaiden, for 1 mana less, with a Dragon tag on it. If you’re playing a Control Dragon deck, it will be an absolute auto-include in a 5-drop slot (Midrange Dragon might still prefer Cobalt Scalebane, but it might play both). Gaining Armor in Warrior is quite important, especially if you aren’t playing an Odd version, then 5 Armor is quite a lot (2.5 turns of Hero Powering). You can combo it with Shield Slam to clear something immediately, or hoard that Armor to get a big AoE with Reckless Flurry. Just gaining Armor is also good enough against Aggro. Dragon tag really helps with the fact that you will have A LOT of Dragon-related cards this expansion, so the more of them have Dragon tags themselves, the easier it will be to activate all of the effects.

It’s not a card you would want to build your entire deck around (like Drakonid Operative was), but it will definitely be a Dragon Warrior staple if such a deck will exist. Not much more to say about it – if Dragon Warrior will be played (and I’m 100% sure that it will at least be extensively tested), it will be a part of the deck. Coincidentally, a lot of those Dragon cards also fit into the Odd build, so that might be the way to go actually.

30 Comments

I’m unsure whether the Armor part is that useful… If you’re Aggro/Tempo, your Armor doesn’t really matter. If you’re control (maybe Odd Warrior?) you need to include other Dragons for this to prop. So would you really include this over Cobalt Scalebane? It’s still good for Shield Slam, so that might make this card viable, otherwise Scalebane seems so much better.

Main problem with this is that Warrior doesn’t really need it. Traditional Dragon Warrior is more of a tempo deck and doesn’t particularly care about getting a bunch of armor and Odd Warrior already has plenty of armor gain. Putting this in an Odd deck isn’t going to win you any games you wouldn’t have already won.

This is not a meta-defining card, but I do think we’re seeing enough solid Dragons come together that splashing them into Baku Warrior is becoming pretty appealing. And there’s also a bunch of nice non-Baku support outside of that! I’d say that some form of Warrior with Dragons is looking promising.

Emberscale Drake looks to be the return of Shieldmaiden to Standard, and obviously for dragon decks, it’s better.

The biggest hurdle this Dragon Warrior deck will have to overcome is dragon decks have traditionally been somewhere between tempo and midrange decks. Most of the dragon related effects have involved either giving a minion higher than rate stats or some method of card advantage be it removal or generating a card. Emberscale is the first to my knowledge that is neither, and if its the only dragon specifically for Warrior, it will likely place Dragon Warrior into a control space.

I’m not quite sure if dragon decks can make the shift to control gracefully.

I think this was made on purpose to prevent Odd Dragon from being too strong. To be fair, Heavy Metal would have been much better if it was at 5 mana. Heck, even 7 mana would’ve been better. I think they are trying to half-push the archetype but prevent it from being full Odd